Report from 7th Meeting of the CIDOC CRM SIG and Meeting of
the Documentation Standards Working Group
Venue: White Hall, Marble Palace - Russian Museum, St. Petersburg,
Russia.
by: Martin Doerr, Stephen Stead, Nick Crofts
Tuesday, 2 September
9:30-12:45
This meeting was held together with the Documentation Standards Working Group in
order to inform both the CIDOC CRM SIG and the DSWG about the progress of the
CIDOC CRM and to have a common discussion about future challenges, as the
CIDOC CRM is being finalized. The Groups regretted that Richard Light could not
attend.
Martin Doerr, Stephen Stead and Nick Crofts presented an overview about the form
and use of the CIDOC CRM and the current status.
Status of collaboration with ISO:
Nick Crofts informed the Group about the ISO process. CIDOC CRM Version 3.4 is
being submitted as DIS (Draft International Standard) end of September. From this
stage on, only minor editorial changes may be applied to the standard. The draft
submitted to ISO will be published by the CRM SIG.
Activities of the CRM SIG:
The CRM SIG held two meetings since the last CIDOC Conference: One in
Rethymnon in October 22-25, 2002 and another in Washington in May 25-28, 2003.
The latter comprised an International Symposium on “Sharing the Knowledge” in
culture and beyond, with scholars and scientists from computer science, software
industry, museums, libraries and archives. The Symposium confirmed that there is no
alternative to the CRM SIG for sharing the knowledge, and that more and more
technology and tools to exploit the opportunities provided with the CRM are
becoming available (see http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr).
The CRM SIG will hold another meeting in Oxford, October 6-9, 2003, to make final
editorial decisions about the CRM and plan for future activities.
Representatives of the CRM SIG will have a first meeting with representatives of the
FRBR Working Group of IFLA to explore the possibility to develop a common
conceptual model for libraries and museums.
Discussion:
Since the editing work on the CIDOC CRM is finishing now, the Groups decided to
have an organized common discussion about the challenges related to cultural
documentation that deserve more attention in the near future by either Groups.
For this discussion, Martin Doerr and Stephen Stead presented a series of topics:
1. CRM-related Topics:

CRM Dissemination and Implementation Support: Organization of
targeted training and presentations about the CIDOC CRM and its utility.
Organization of collaborations and discussion for a for the best practice of
implementing effective CRM-compatible systems.

Mapping methodology and technology: Collaborations on the
methodology to “map” schemata of existing information systems to the
CIDOC CRM in order to (1) create automatic transformation algorithms
from a given information system into a CRM-compatible form for
information sharing and exchange, or (2) to verify the compatibility of an
existing system or one under development with the CRM, or (3) to create
query mediators that transform queries in terms of the CRM into
equivalent queries that can be processed by different local information
systems. Creation of a registry for existing mappings as resource for
harmonization of different interpretations and guide to good practice.
2. Other Potential Topics

Digital Preservation: Digital preservation has become a major topic for
computer science, digital libraries, archives and others. CIDOC was not
regarded as a forum to contribute much to the technical questions
involved, but rather to address questions of how museums should
organize digital preservation as collaborative, interinstitutional effort, to
address the question which kinds of information deserve high and highest
preservation efforts and how to organize those, and other questions an
interdisciplinary group as CIDOC can answer better than others for
museums.

Thesauri Structure: The standards defining the structure of thesauri are
getting old and do not reflect any more challenges of distributed
environments, global electronic communication and the progress in
computer science and IT to handle large formal ontologies with rich
semantic structure. Several projects and national initiatives (e.g. UK)
currently revise the standards for thesaurus structures. The International
NKOS Forum (NKOS stands for Networked Knowledge Organisation
Systems) supports the communication and exchange of experience about
these efforts. Museum documentation requires a multitude of frequently
quite specialized thesauri. Being rich in all kinds of knowledge, better and
richer semantics of thesaurus structures are helpful in the domain. There
is no other organisation than CIDOC that could represent the museum
requirements in these efforts. The proposal is to produce an “ontology” or
“thesaurus” of term relationships, such as different “flavours” of BT/NT,
SYN, USE, UF, ALT, and the most prominent specializations of RT (partwhole, product-process, process-producer etc.) relevant for museum
semantics. Such a thesaurus would allow for effectively relating different
thesaurus formats and thereby integration their information. It should be
used to define new standards suitable for museums.

“Scientific” Questions: A major task of museums is to serve as
information centres for the interested public, scientists, scholars and
teachers on all levels. Whereas the questions naive museum visitors ask
have been explored in some projects (e.g. CIMI’s CHIOS project), the
nature of the scientific or scholarly questions to museums is widely
unknown. Experts are normally not able to recover real questions from
memory. As a consequence, the support of access to information systems
in the domain is either based on naive assumptions or, even worse, on
the needs of the administrators of museum objects only. The CIDOC
CRM provides a new chance: such questions can be analysed and
formalized in terms of queries to a system using the CRM as schema. The
proposal is to organize the creation of a repository of real scientific and
scholarly questions as a public resource maintained by CIDOC to support
research for better information systems, by collection from respective
archives of various museum departments.

Museum Directories/Collection Level Description: Museums maintain
a good practice of creating information systems about their objects.
Archives on the other hand typically describe fonds or collections as a
whole, rather than the individual document. With more and more
museums providing on-line information services, there is a need to
characterize the subject and holdings of museums as a whole in an
organized way. There is a need to develop a methodology and data
format for that purpose.

Reference Architecture and Workflow: Larger museums encounter a
problem to access what is called in industry “enterprise knowledge”. They
employ necessarily a multitude of systems, such as collection
management, content management, image bases, library systems, web
presentations, catalogue publishing etc. These systems cannot
reasonably be merged into one monolithic, and there are frequent
updates to any component. There is a need to effectively share
knowledge residing in all those systems within an organisation, and then
between organisations. The proposal is to collaborate with museums,
projects, computer science and implementers to develop reference
architectures for effective knowledge sharing, based on an analysis of the
work flow of information production and information consumption, the
needs to employ specialized systems and the chances to merge systems.

FISH: FISH proposes to become a CIDOC Working Group or part of a
CIDOC Working Group

Natural History: Natural History museums are under-represented in
CIDOC. The proposal is to elaborate the needs for information sharing
between Natural History and other museum disciplines and to update
documentation practice under that view point.
After the discussion of these proposals indicative votes were taken for each proposal.
The topic of Digital Preservation found such strong interest that a new group under
the leadership of Regine Scheffel was founded. All CRM related topics found the
strong interest of the majority.
Enough supporters were found for the topics “Thesauri Structure”, “Scientific
Questions” and “Museum Directories/Collection Level Description”.